Prototype Festival: Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists
It is 10:30 PM and my bedtime is usually 9:30 PM (I know), but I had a surprisingly busy day and I promised myself that for the first ninety days of 2021 I would write and publish an arts and culture piece on my blog and I am honoring that commitment to myself so here is an incredibly harried and stream-of-conscious response to the contemporary opera Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists composed by Valgeir Sigurdsson.
My first thought in the early movements of Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists was literally “big Sufjan Stevens energy,” which is to say they seem beautiful but if you think about them too hard you realize they don’t actually make any sense. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Sufjan, but take, for example, an actual Sufjan Stevens lyrics, “When I was three; three, maybe four/she left me at the video store/wooooo,” and compare that with a prominent reoccurring motif in Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists is the lyric “It’s a story, it’s not a story/It has elements of a story.” That was a run-on sentence!
What??? Like, I get it. But also, no thanks. After I already made the decision to watch this I decided to google it for context (really should have done some preliminary research on this one) and found out that it’s based on a book of poetry by a. rawlings. I love poetry! However, I find adapting poetry for the stage to often be a bad idea. See also: Cats.
Anyway, continuing on. As I meandered down this poorly thought through decision, I also decided I should probably google the word “lepidopterist” to see what that’s all about. Turns out, it’s a scientist who studies butterflies and moths. I hate those! Not the scientists, I’m sure their fine, but I hate butterflies. I value their role in our ecosystem, but I don’t want them anywhere near me, thank you very much.
But I made my commitment to watch this recording of an opera from May 2014 in Reykjavik, and I am nothing if not a gal who honors her commitments. So I journeyed on, and as I realized that I was watching a truly non-narrative minimalist contemporary opera with three singers and one other performer, I’m not gonna lie to you, my brain turned off. I have no idea what happened.
I will say this, and it’s gonna sound disingenuous and mean and petty but I really truly mean it: the lighting and and video design by Ingi Bekk and animation by Pierre-Alain Giraud were truly incredible, and interplayed with the scenic design by Eva Signy Berger beautifully. I believe if I had been able to this in person I would have been captivated by the world they created, even though it was often evocative of my insect nemeses, butterflies. I think the minimalist score would have felt more meditative and trancelike and the imagery would have just been consuming. However, on my computer screen, my brain said “not today” and just thought about other things for an hour.
Can you tell festival season is getting to me?
This was written in twelve minutes and edited in three. Good night!